BlackBerry Maker To Buy QNX For RTOS & Dev. Suite 51
Freshly Exhumed writes "Research In Motion, maker of BlackBerry smartphones, said on Friday it will buy QNX Software Systems, makers of Real-Time Operating Systems, for an undisclosed amount as it moves to boost integration of its devices with in-vehicle audio systems. QNX Neutrino is a Unix-like RTOS, and their Momentics development suite is for embedded applications for a wide variety of industries. While RIM has offered somewhat limited support of open source projects on its BlackBerry platform, the future of QNX's Foundry27 development project, which uses the Apache 2.0 license, has not yet been mentioned."
UNIX-like? (Score:2, Insightful)
If by UNIX-like, you mean a microkernel OS designed for scalability using message passing at a low level and delivering realtime performance and strong isolation of kernel components, then, yes, it's UNIX-like. If that's how you define UNIX-like, then you're probably someone who has never used UNIX.
QNX has a POSIX compatibility layer, but so do Symbian, OpenVMS, and Windows NT and I wouldn't describe any of them as UNIX-like.
RIM Gearing Up To FIGHT Apple! (Score:3, Insightful)
RIM has finally stepped up to the plate to FIGHT the GOOD against APPLE! YES!
Although I hate to see QNX be owned by RIM, the people who brought us Blackberry (recently completed a blackberry app - icky sticky java with types getting stuck all over the place for no good reason), this is a major massive move by RIM that sets them on the board to fight Apple. Before now it was not even a fair match. Now at least RIM has a chance again.
Re:Please don't fuck this up, RIM (Score:5, Insightful)
I second the sentiment that QNX is a great operating system. My first contact with it was through the incredible 1.44 MB QNX Demo Disk, which was a bootable 1.44 MB diskette image containing QNX (4.something, I think), with GUI and graphical web browser. Did I mention that the OS was POSIX-compliant and real-time? At the time, Linux and XFree86 absolutely paled in comparison.
While on the topic, I would like to say that I would like to have a desktop OS that provided real-time guarantees (or at least "most of the time"). On my shiny multi-GHz, multi-core, multi-GB-of-RAM machine, Firefox still manages to hang the user interface for multiple seconds when it first starts up and I type something it the Awesome bar. I'd like to at least be able to switch windows and start sending input to another application in = 0.1 seconds! If we could extend the real-time guarantees to a GUI library so that we could have, say, button click animations and other "I got your message and I'm working on it" feedback to respond within certain time frames, that would be great.
Dont follow Palm (Score:4, Insightful)
I spent many hours playing with it on a Dell pentium 133/32mb laptop. when Palm bought BeOS for its software assets hardly any were ever used. I hope RIM does better. they could make excellent products with an OS that light but powerful.
Re:UNIX-like? (Score:3, Insightful)
fork() on Windows>/quote>
Worked fine for me under the POSIX layer I was using (cygwin) when I last had a Windows machine (around 2003, running Win2K).
If cygwin makes Windows Unix then Wine makes Linux Windows.